Louis Durey
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION: LES SIX SCHOLARSHIP
I am fortunate to have been entrusted with dozens of unpublished scores of the composer Louis Durey by the Durey family. Since first meeting them, I have premiered and recorded all of the unpublished cycles and songs dating 1918-1968. Durey Rediscovered is a collection of many of those works, released in 2017 by New Focus Recordings and featuring myself at the piano, Jesse Blumberg, baritone, Bill Burden, tenor, Sidney Outlaw, baritone and Adriana Zabala, mezzo-soprano. The CD was met with excellent reviews and featured on CBC Radio’s program “Disc of the Week” with Paolo Pietropaolo, host.
WITHIN AND WITHOUT: LES SIX AT 100
January 16-19, 2020
Princeton University hosted the 100-year anniversary of the formation of Les Six in Paris. Durey Rediscovered was featured in the exhibition “Les Six: Collective Traces,” displayed in the Mendel Music Library. I joined many other Les Six scholars in listening to seminars and lectures, and took part in a special pre-conference tour of the archive Traces of Les Six in Princeton University Special Collections in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.
LECTURES
Over the past five years, I have been invited to lecture on Louis Durey at various venues, including the Brooklyn Art Song Society, the Cincinati Song Initiative, La Maison Française NYC, National Sawdust, Brooklyn under the auspices of the Classical Recording Foundation, in Dr. Casey Robards’ class at the University of Illinois and as a repeat guest of Dr. Alexa Woloshyn at Carnegie Mellon University.
DISSERTATION
“Louis Durey.” A Doctoral Dissertation International Research Fellowship from University of Minnesota Graduate School enabled me to travel to Paris, France in October of 2003 in order to study Louis Durey (1888-1979), a member of the Group of Six. Thus far, the only extant text concerning Durey is written in French. Moreover, of his 25 song cycles, many of them beautifully written for voice and piano, only 8 have been published. My dissertation focuses on Durey’s earliest works in his vocal/piano oeuvre with regard to the aesthetic outlined by Jean Cocteau in “Coq et Arlequin” and as compared with other composers of the time such as Schoenberg, Poulenc and Debussy.